WordblogJournalism in a changing world

After reading the comments on Jay Rosen’s post attacking Michael Skube’s Los Angeles Times piece on blogging, I went out and bought a copy of The Cult of the Amateur.

It was probably only a few of the 339 comments that motivated me but they gave an overall impression of a bunch of people who simply hated traditional media. This was one comment: “There’s a war on for the minds of America, and the blogs are winning. The trad media is terrified, because they know it. Their pedestal has been kicked out from under them, and they just can’t stand that.”

And another: “YouTube is doing to TV news what blogs are doing to pundits. In a year or two CNN will be as parasitic upon the internet as we have even been upon the MSM.”

Most of the comments were responding to Rosen’s call for examples of blogs doing original reporting. Of course they do. But there was an overall tone suggesting it was about a battle between bloggers and traditional media. The commenters were not company I would care to keep.

Skube’s piece was a polemic emphasising and generalising to make its point. I was undermined by inaccuracy. Yet why did it being about an outpouring of vitriol?

It was clearly written to be provocative but concluded with a point that needs debating:

The more important the story, the more incidental our opinions become. Something larger is needed: the patient sifting of fact, the acknowledgment that assertion is not evidence and, as the best writers understand, the depiction of real life. Reasoned argument, as well as top-of-the-head comment on the blogosphere, will follow soon enough, and it should. But what lodges in the memory, and sometimes knifes us in the heart, is the fidelity with which a writer observes and tells. The word has lost its luster, but we once called that reporting.

Rosen has since responded in the LA Times.

Andrew Keen’s argument in The Cult of the Amateur is not so very different. In essence it is that our cultural values are being overturned. He puts it like this:

What happens, you might ask, when ignorance meets egotism meets bad taste meets mob rule?
The monkeys take over. Say good-bye to today’s experts and cultural gatekeepers — our reporters, news anchors, editors, music companies, and Hollywood movie studios. In today’s cult of the amateur, the monkeys are running the show. Wither their infinite typewriters, they are authoring the future. And we may not like how it reads.

Keen, unlike Skube, cannot be accused of not knowing or understanding the web. He has his own blog, has been involved in web start-ups and commentated widely on culture, media and technology. His central argument comes across in an interview on the Colbert Report:
He has sparked a serious debate including a fascinating exchange between himself and Emily Bell, editor in chief of Guardian Unlimited, which nicely demonstrates how the web can facilitate the development of argument and counter argument.

Jeff Howe put a strong argument for not ignoring Keen saying his arguments will “sound mightily persuasive to a significant constituency who do believe the Internet is primarily a repository of porn, spam and corrosive amateurism. Failing to recognize that the choir to which Keen preaches might just be larger than our own congregation is an arrogant, and potentially irreversible blunder.”

I read The Cult of the Amateur with growing frustration, feeling Keen wanted to put the genie back in the bottle. The chapter headed “Solutions” suggested he might have some answers. On newspapers his best shot is to comment that Guardian Unlimited has “managed to achieve some measure of economic success by effectively balancing its costs with its online advertising sales”.

That does not answer the shortfall caused when the loss of print sales and advertising revenue does not match the income from online advertising, which is doesn’t. Howard Owens is another who has engaged in the debate, in a series of three posts. In the third post he says:

The media train is hurtling forward, but journalists are not driving. Even the biggest traditional media companies are not at the wheel. In fact, there is nobody making sure we stay on the rails. The train is propelled by collective action — the action of ambitious entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and investors, technology researchers and engineers, computer programmers and amateur hackers and curious and demanding audiences, as well as some of us in the media, with our constant demands for new, different and better. All of these swirling forces create the turbulence that keeps the train on its collusion course with our collective destiny.

And I have no idea what that is, or if we’ll ever really get there.

Scary stuff, to be sure, but that’s the reality of the situation.

So it’s adapt or die.

That just about sums up our knowledge at the moment. It also takes me back to my starting point which is that there are a lot of people, confused and worried about the uncertain future of journalism who need to be a part of the discussion. Calling on Skube to retire or accusing Keen of Stalinism is not likely to make them feel there is a debate worth joining.

I hope there will be all opinions present when Andrew Keen takes part in a discussion moderated by Richard Sambrook at the Frontline Club in London on September 6. I would be there is I wasn’t flying to Spain that evening,